Sometimes the footnotes are more interesting than the text, or, at least as interesting. Hellfire Sermons came in on the tail end of the strummy wave of British indie pop bands. While not prolific, this disc shows that they made each single count. This compilation spotlights a band that fit between a few different niches and combined creative musical ideas with a distinct lyrical personality to make some fantastic music.
The off-kilter music on here is often comparable to The Smiths, James (in their early, skittish days) and A House. The Sermons didn't have the polish of Morrissey and Marr, et. al., and didn't often venture into the hyped up fury that the other two aforementioned could generate. The Sermons clearly had their own path to follow.
Colin Pennington sang in one of those voices that isn't entirely musical, yet is quite expressive. Pennington didn't sound like a rock star. He sounded like a real person, with real feelings and thoughts. The Sermons' music was at turns poppy and romantic or funky and squirrelly. Pennington and Neal Carr did a brilliant job of weaving their guitar parts together, with jangly rhythms mixing with sometimes off-kilter and sometimes lyrical lead guitar fills. In their songs, The Sermons showed a mastery of song form so thorough that they could bend and tweak the norms to create new yet familiar shapes and sounds.
This album is compiled in pretty much chronological order. The Sermons started out issuing fairly chirpy singles, but always tried to find a darker underbelly. This tendency became more pronounced on some of their later material. The swaying folk number "The Best Laugh I Ever Had" has a friendly countenance contrasted with observations like "sometimes when I'm dreaming/love plays dead". The song is a swirl of uncertainty and doubt, appropriate since it is dealing with mental illness, as Pennington muses that "I'm only happy/when I'm smiling and happy". The song is grounded on Carr's active circular guitar parts and Alan Creevy's offbeat drumming. The comparisons to James and A House I made above are spot on with this track.
The band made use of dissonance in a pop structure on songs like "Not Nailed Down", which has verses that harangue like The Fall, with the chorus managing to bounce through the murk. On "No Hands", the band manages to grind and lumber, with the Television-like interplay between the guitars offering a respite. This is one of the most unlikely songs to have a "la la la la" chorus. The music is perfect for a song about being in Hell ("it's a hell of a place/this hell is" -- Sparks could have penned that long).
There are some songs that aren't so dark. Their debut single, "Freak Storm", has a majestic feel that is aided by how the band draws out the verses to build the tension, before moving the song to the intense chorus. The instrumental break is breathtaking. That a band so new could so thoroughly master dynamics and weave together three superb sections, each with a different feel, is simply awesome.
Not everything was so knotted. "Blows Rain Down" is simple and lovely, with a basic delay guitar effect keying the song and one chord change providing a springboard for the chorus. Everything But The Girl could have done a wonderful cover of this, though they probably wouldn't have produced the full emotional shadings found here. "Gentleman Caller" brings to mind another great group that just preceded the Sermons, The Go-Betweens. Of course, it's a great song.
The Hellfire Sermons cannot be forgotten. In fact, they should be celebrated. This is one of the most essential reissues to be released in the past 12 months. Anyone who is a fan of British indie pop should own it.
This piece came from Fufkin.Com